New entrant Wind Mobile officially launched their wireless service back in December of 2009 and now operate in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. After much speculation, today they officially announced they’ve “exceeded 100,000 subscriptions in early July 2010”. We’re now in the middle of August so the number might be a few thousand higher. There’s no word on which launch cities make up the most subscriptions, but one thing to consider is the number of customers Wind would like to bring on. It’s known that the goal is to have 1.5 million customers during the first 3 years.
In a release this morning Anthony Lacavera, Chairman of Globalive & WIND Mobile said “We’re thrilled to have welcomed over 100,000 customers in our first two quarters. We will continue to expand and grow, and we welcome competition as part of our commitment to offering Canadians the kind of mobile experience they want and deserve.”
100,000 customers on board… 1.4 million to go. Impressive stats for a start-up company.
Update: Just finished an interview with Wind CEO Ken Campbell about the 100,000 subscribers. They’re pretty happy about the results. In addition, over the past year he states that their network has seen improvements, adding more cell sites and dropping less calls. He says that the industry average of dropped calls is less than 1% and they are “well below” this mark, but “depends on the area”.
Check it out the interview after the break
Update#2: Iain Marlow from the Globe wrote a great piece about Wind’s 100,000 subscribers and lined them up to previous wireless start-ups. Iain states that “Comparisons between Wind and previous generations of new entrants would necessarily be inaccurate, since the total number of wireless subscribers in Canada, the market positions and power of the national wireless incumbents, and the decision to launch in which cities and when is totally different. But by the end of its first full year, new wireless player Microcell, which had the Fido brand, had 65,667 wireless customers. Clearnet, on the other hand, had 95,225. By the end of their second full year in operation, they had 282,174 and 308,473 subscribers respectively, at a time when Canada only had about 4.2-million subscribers.”
Update #3: I checked out the financial reports from Orascom (Wind’s financial backer) and they report the first 6 months there was a total of 93,882 subscribers. (link is here to the “Earnings Release First Half 2010”). No word on how many are active subscribers.
Source: CNW
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